Fateless
by Cheria
Summary: After everything, he was still a tool.


He was born Walter, ruler of the army, and nothing more.

Ideally, the community as a whole would be his family, thereby rendering surnames meaningless. But though he was without a mother soon following his conception, the only parent he knew was his father, who was the embodiment of discipline. And as much as he uttered that word, it was devoid of the childish clinginess others his age exhibited.

In another life, he might have had a surrogate mother. Orphaned Ferines were often coddled by the elders who had lost their blood and flesh relatives. Or, in rarer cases, the children were left to their devices for one reason or another. No one, be it child or adult, was ever overlooked in a community so tightly knit like a woven piece of cloth.

Hailing from his father's line, Walter was kept at bay and treated more with mild reverence than with affection. The warmth of being loved, as it were, was lost on him. And because of his never having possessed such attachments, he never looked at the other children with envy. They lived a life different from his. It was a fact he'd come to accept, and one he felt neither a desire nor need to begrudge.

Walter possessed no sense of loss, for his father never talked about his late wife. That woman, the mother, simply never existed.

Most of all, his deprivation meant nothing in the face of the Ferines' suffering, which he had acquainted himself with early on.

He had a trainer who put him to work as soon as he could walk for a father, and that was his life as he knew and accepted it.

_Nerifes has blessed you with a strong son. Raise that boy well._

Physical lessons came and went for Walter. When it came to a formal learning environment with the rest of his peers, they hailed him as a genius for his seeming inexhaustible stamina and endurance. Running and other strenuous activities were where he thrived and commanded respect. He wasn't a particularly large child, quite lean and small on the contrary, but he packed a punch in his hands and spring in his legs impressive for his frame.

At first, the rest of the children flocked to him. Then they began to shy away when he gave them a look they perceived to be cold, though he meant nothing by it, and when their caretakers said he was that way because he would have an important duty to fulfill.

He wasn't bothered. Even if he sat out on their idea of fun, he was still regarded as the best among them. That, too, was none of his concern, for he lacked such a competitive streak.

The same couldn't be said for his academics, according to the instructors. But they were always of the same opinion: he tried. He learned their language and read and wrote at a decent pace; however, it was impossible to maintain his interest in many of the liberal subjects. It was in these moments his attitude began surfacing, which they wrote off as premature apathy.

Others branded him an idiot and pitied the waste of physical talent. Some felt oppositely, believing that he'd learned to prioritize based on his family's long-standing tradition as guardians.

A position that had gone stale in the last four millennia, but no one ever said it aloud.

The sole exception was history.

His ability to retain information was remarkable, yet there was a flaw to his memorizing mechanism. He was, in a word, picky. He fixated himself on the gruesome details of the rampant racial prejudice and hardly batted anything else an eye. Every bit of misery that Ferines had had to endure in the past - and the present - engraved itself into his mind, and Walter was eerily quiet about the injustices that swam about in his head.

One day, a female scholar sat next to him and inquired as to his favorite moment. Not hesitating, he responded with the events revolving around the Cataclysm.

"Why?"

"Because filth should die."

He was eight years old. It wasn't long before he was taken out of formal education in favor of mainstream learning from his father.

_Walter. Do you love the Ferines?_

No matter how dumb the adults might have thought him, it was due to his excellent physical marks that no one appeared surprised when he summoned his teriques after his eleventh birthday. The manifestation of his soul rested on the calloused palm of his hand, its wings not fluttering, but twitching, as onlookers scrutinized its appearance.

It was like the night, one said. Another intervened, arguing that it was more akin to death. They whispered that a soul, the base and core of a person, should not be black. It could be taken as an omen.

Walter watched and said nothing. He decided that he would be an omen, then - an omen to whomever dared cross his line of duty, which meant that he would be the bringer of security to his kind.

The elders bestowed onto him a name befitting his private declaration.

Delques.

Gravestone. Flight.

Fatal, Deadly, Final. Black.

He was Walter Delques, ruler of the army and wings of death.

_Yes._

With age, he nursed a growing boldness until he one day found himself pasted to the back of a tree, listening. Shamelessly, his heart didn't pick up in pace or skip a beat even once when he heard them sit and talk, oblivious to his presence.

Innocent laughter flooded his ears. One was quieter and more refined than the other, so he placed names to the voices with ease.

She played, pouted, and chatted like any other child. At the same time, she was unlike any other child. There was a heavenly quality to her, something that set her apart from the rest and painted her in a light no one could hope to rival. To Walter, it was tantamount to "savior." He could not have described it another way if he'd been asked.

He wasn't a particularly poetic person.

Nor was he prone to the child's affliction known as boredom.

Any other boy would have dove into the lake and swam off by now, but Walter was content with her words and sounds of movement as he stared off into the water. There was no time to waste gallivanting across the village or confronting his cohorts. What time he had should be made use of, spent on doing what he was destined to do.

When he wasn't doing that, he fantasized about it.

He stood behind the tree for hours, well into early evening when the girls retired and allowed him to return home.

A week later, Stella sent her sister off early and rounded the bushes to greet him. She's suspected him a few days ago, had even worn a small smile during play when she'd noticed the corner of his sleeve protruding from the trunk's side, but only approached him now when he failed to make more advancements in his so-called watch.

"You don't have to stay here," she said, not in the slightest peeved. "You can join us."

His impassive expression didn't waver. His mind, however, exploded with thoughts before receding to a resounding no. He told her as much, and Stella didn't push the subject. Rather, she gave him a pleasant smile and said her goodbyes before fetching her sister.

Standing there in his lonesome, it was the first time he felt something was amiss.

_That girl there is the Merines. When I'm gone, you will be her protector._

Sometime before his twelfth, a boy came to the village. He was blue-eyed but white-haired, and clad in the clothing of the land folk. He looked pitiful, so the Ferines took him in.

Not one to defy his elders, Walter had accepted it with an uneasy face. It was one boy, he told himself. A boy that looked to be around his age. An Orerines boy. Nothing struck him as dangerous, yet everything screamed wrong to him. After a while, he stopped thinking altogether to push the increasing doubt aside.

Then the Merines took a shine to the boy named Senel.

The more Walter watched, the more as it seemed as though he was growing more distant. Even so, he stayed and watched for as long he could. After a while, he ceased standing beside the tree and patrolling from afar, which, to the oblivious onlooker, appeared as if he was simply walking by back and forth. With each month, the distance from which he held his gaze grew. And within a year of Senel's stay, it dawned on him as to why.

He was being replaced.

Within the next month or two, he was replaced.

_Yes._

He blamed Senel when the Merines failed the Rite of Accession. There was no such thing as a failed Merines. There was no such thing as a guardian to a failed Merines. He repeated this chant with balled fists, eyes narrowed in inexplicable disappointment as he stood off in the corner, covered by the shadows.

They called her a failure and panicked about what that meant. They thought about themselves, about their kind, not about her or what this meant to her. She'd failed, and thus her well-being was secondary to the longevity of the Ferines.

It was the first time he had thought the elders were talking a pack of lies and disagreed so fervently with them. He held his tongue in check, however.

Despite his want, his necessity to see her, Walter stood at the doorway and stared after Stella and Senel sneaked away. It was dark and he was alone, and the scenery remained thus for minutes, hours. He ran into hiding when they returned some time later, glancing at Senel in contempt as he headed inside.

Not a second later, his father clamped a disapproving hand over his shoulder and led him away.

_She's mine._

When he was fourteen, he saw red. Flames licked at the trees and dome-shaped houses. People screamed in fear and terror as they ran about in frantic search of an exit, only to be cut down by monsters in armor brandishing pointed weapons. The surrounding lake reflected the hideous orange of the fire and bled with the blood of the bodies floating on its surface.

His father caught him at the door of their home and threw him inside, shooting Walter a glance when he yelped in protest.

"The Merines will be safe. You must flee," he commanded.

"I'm going with you."

Defiantly, he got up and was struck in the face - harshly, but only enough to put him back on the floor. In his daze, he made out the blurry figure plunging into the midst of the chaos outside.

The silhouette of a man with a softer build appeared in the doorway and pulled him up by the arm, encouraging him in an elderly voice Walter recognized to be Maurits'. Standing on his own two feet and ignoring his bloated cheek, he nodded and followed suit alongside a group of Ferines.

Soldiers pursued them to the outskirts of the village. Adrenaline pumped throughout his body as Walter stepped in the front and cast his eres with such rigid movements that his shoulder ached in protest. Streams of light assaulted the monsters from above, but it was all he managed before Maurits ordered him to fall back. When he didn't, too caught up in his blind rage and preparing another spell, he was forcefully hauled away by two pairs of hands.

He never saw his father again.

_The village is no more. We must make do elsewhere._

The Merines went missing.

As did Senel.

When Maurits relayed the news to him, Walter turned, took one step, and fell to his knees. Around him, the world spun, and his head throbbed every time Maurits called his name in concern. The heat in his head and chest was unbearable. His shivering, whether out of grief or anger, said more than he was willing, and he was confined to bed for the rest of the evening.

It was the closest to being ill he'd ever been. But he neither cried nor shouted in despair.

By the next morning, he was fit as a fiddle - to the naked eye, for when Maurits took one look at him, he sighed.

The next few days, the Ferines pooled their resources and powers to erect a stronger, more convincing barrier than the one they'd made for the last village. Being an eren, himself, Walter spent much of his days at the site of the project despite how Maurits insisted he rest instead. Their survival, after all, was priority to his single physical well-being.

Later, Maurits sat him down for a talk, where he told Walter the truth of the incident a month prior. What Walter took from it was thus: Trusting an Orerines, child or no, had cost them many lives, including nearly that of the Merines. Senel had played them for fools by using their kindness against them. It wasn't the barrier that had failed them.

With clenched fists, it took all of his willpower to not get up and throw the table over. Sensing his all too honest anger, Maurits spoke.

"You realize what this means, don't you?"

They both knew very well. The Orerines would be given no quarter, and the Ferines would strike back with the might of Nerifes at their back. And to do that, their agent, the symbol of their salvation, must be retrieved from the hands of Orerines filth.

His mind had already been made up long ago, even if it had been decided for him before his birth.

"I serve the Merines," he said. "Tell me what to do."

For the sake of the Ferines, he would be their tool.


End file.
